MDX alumna Helen Kirwan's movie screening - Memory Theatre

22/05/2018

Memory Theatre (2017) at Close-Up Cinema, London, 6 June 2018

Helen Kirwan will presenta screening of Memory Theatre (2017) at the Close-Up Cinema, London on Wednesday 6 June 2018. This will be followed by a short talk and Q&A with the artist, and drinks at the Close-Up bar.Kirwan will discuss her practice as a performance artist and filmmaker, as well as her research into mourning, memorial, fragment and trace. Over many years, this line of enquiry has taken the artist on long journeys across Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia. The Q&A will be led by the artist and filmmaker Dr. Jane Madsen.

Screening, talk and Q&A, 6 June 2018, 7-8.30pm, followed by drinks at the Close-Up bar until 10pm. Tickets are available here.

Memory Theatre began as a series of outdoor performances by the artist Helen Kirwan in Kent, Morocco and the west of Ireland. Filmed live, the video footage was subsequently edited into a two-channel video. Dressed as a widow, in black, the artist endlessly undertakes futile and absurd tasks such as measuring the sea with buckets at Joss Bay and counting stones on the vast shingle beach at Dungeness, Kent. In the desert of Merzouga, Morocco, she documents the passing of time by pouring grains of sand into the dunes. These endless repetitions express ‘the physical traces of mourning, which manifest themselves through absurd and futile activity,’ says Kirwan.

The artist is informed by the concept of the philosophical fragment as posited by the Early German Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schlegel: a dynamic practice which aims at fragmentation for its own sake. The essential incompletion of Kirwan’s futile reiterations is itself the mode of fulfilment. A sound piece by the award-winning Dublin-based composer Tom Lane was commissioned for the video and is the product of a long-standing collaboration between the artist and musician.

The elements of earth, fire, wind and water are at play in the outdoor sites of Memory Theatre: Morocco’s hot desert sand dunes, Kent’s beaches, and the ancient bog in Connemara, Ireland. Kirwan’s performances involving contact between the body and environment are intensely haptic. They serve as a metaphor for a system of mapping and attempted navigation through what she calls the wilderness and ‘fog’ of bereavement.

Repetition and journeying are part of the endless searching and yearning which some psychologists identify as intrinsic to the bereavement process. The artist’s intuitive connection with the soil, stone and sea, conjure up the intensity of grief and, as she awaits her own death, she marks with infinite futility, the finitude of human existence. There is also a personal significance that stems from the landscapes of Kent, where the artist has lived for 30 years, and Ireland, where she is from.

Memory Theatre was first unveiled as a video installation at the ‘Personal Structures - Crossing Borders’ exhibition at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017) and presented at the Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne.